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Hilda Geiringer

A brilliant mathematician who did groundbreaking work in Europe, Hilda Geiringer was stalled in her professional career after immigrating to the US, where her gender and her age became serious liabilities. Geiringer studied mathematics and physics at the University of Vienna and did her 1917 doctoral thesis on the Fourier series with two variables. In 1921 she became a research assistant to Richard von Mises, director of the Institute of Applied Mathematics in Berlin, who would later become her collaborator and her husband. In 1927 she began teaching applied mathematics at the University of Berlin, but in 1933 she fled to Turkey, where she became a professor of mathematics at the University of Istanbul and did major work in probability. She immigrated to the US in 1939 to teach at Bryn Mawr. In 1944 she married von Mises, who was now a professor at Harvard, and became a professor and department chair at Wheaton College. Because women were not accepted in the field, and because of prejudice against older mathematicians, Geiringer was never able to work at a major institution. After her husband’s death in 1953 and her retirement in 1959, she completed his work on statistics and probability and continued her own research.